Exploring and reflecting.

Menu

Another Momentum

People have been curious as to why I am such a wanderer and why it is that I have not settled in one place, wondering what it is that I am searching for in my journeys. I haven’t always been sure what it is that has kept me moving and have at times wondered if there was not something pathological that prevents me from staying in one spot for long. I have always lived this way. A contradiction to the notion that I am not comfortable in sitting still is that I have participated in over twenty silent, meditation retreats over the years, many of them spanning a week or more in length.

These days I see what it is that influences me more clearly, that a consequence of everyday, repetitive, habitual activity in modern civilisation is that it builds a wall around the ordinary state of consciousness and makes it almost impossible to see beyond it. It encourages behaviour aimed at keeping one safe. In some ways, my way has become a way of stepping outside of that, (there are many ways), that allows me to have a deeper experience. James Hillman says that anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. Colin Wilson talks about the contemporary norm being life within our ego consciousness, with a sense of complete self-sufficiency that denies the presence of spiritual worlds.

The way that I have come to live allows for awakening to an energy that has its own momentum, that is its own cause and effect, an energy that has no resistance and does not deteriorate. It involves a strong relationship to silence, allowing myself to be led by what I discover there. That silence heals fear, influencing how I perceive life; seeing that the world and others have a more holy quality, more than an emotional experience: something that I do not experience in a more ordinary state. Robert Sardello writes “Our ordinary consciousness cannot perceive in this way: it bifurcates our experience, and in our usual perceiving, things are either possessed by our consciousness or left “out there” alone, as independent, abstract objects. It is not the peace that Silence brings to us that makes us want to move toward it, but this aspect of holy anticipation within the very things of the world! An anticipation of what? By whom? The answers are not given within the experience of Silence itself. The sense of anticipation is simply present and opens us to experience the world as on the way, as unfinished, as still in the process of being created, of coming into being, and as moving toward some unknown completion.”

IRIS PHOTOGRAPHS

So we have to understand the existence, this life, our relationship to society. We have not only to understand our relationship with each other, with society, but to bring about a radical change in that relationship. And that is our responsibility. I do not think we feel this urgency. – Krishnamurti